WAM! Writing, Art & Music Forum

“He knew that thought clings round dead limbs”: Materiality, Representation, and the Corpse in Hamlet

By David Beckman

What do we think of when we think of Hamlet (or Hamlet)? For many, the image that comes to mind is of a youngish man, dressed likely in black, holding a skull, reciting the lines that begin, “Alas, poor Yorick…” (Many may not recall what follows those first three words, or may misremember the very next clause, which is not in fact “I knew him well, Horatio…”)

That is, by now, a common observation with which to begin a discussion of Hamlet’s Act V, Scene 1.[1] And most critics are in agreement as to what that image signifies within the play’s narrative and historical contexts: the recognition of death’s inevitability, of one’s need to bear in mind and prepare for that end, and of death’s power as a social leveler. Inevitably, critics note the prominence of human skulls in the memento mori tradition[2] of icons communicating those sober reminders, and Marjorie Garber is undoubtedly right in observing, “When we hear someone say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ we do not think that he or she is speaking of Hamlet’s childhood jester. We know that what is at stake is rather the general case of mortality and the human condition” (Garber 467). Bettie Anne Doebler, Roland Mushat Frye and Harry Morris most exhaustively examine the scene’s connections to the memento mori tradition, and many of their conclusions are sound. Doebler, for instance, links up the historical and narrative contexts of the scene by observing: “The audience awaits Hamlet’s discovery of the particular death of Ophelia while he generalizes upon the frailty of all worldly things that men value” (Doebler 69). But Morris perhaps goes too far when he more sweepingly concludes, “All then is here in Act V, Scene 1, to mark the scene as a set piece clearly in the memento mori–timor mortis genre” (Morris 1038). Goes too far because what seems most affecting about this moment—and what has too infrequently been discussed—is not its role as an iconographic “set piece” but rather its own representation of “particular death” (in Doebler’s phrase) in conjunction with those iconic generalities.

The real impact of Hamlet’s musings in this scene, it has always seemed to me, is not in the broader implications and associations he offers, but in where he begins: with the immediate, physical substance of Yorick’s skull. What critics tend to overlook—what we all, perhaps, forget when recalling this image out of its fuller verbal context—is that Hamlet’s encounter with the skull is at least as much about (in fact both begins and ends with) that horrible material reality:

Ham.     This?                                                     [Takes the skull.]

Grav.    E’en that.

Ham.     Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

Hor.      What’s that, my lord?

Ham.     Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’the’ earth?

Hor.      E’en so.

Ham.     And smelt so? Pah!                          [Puts down the skull.]

                                                                             (V.i.176-194)[3]

The opening pronouns’ emphasis on concreteness; the final attention to the skull’s offensive smell; and especially that remarkable sentence, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft”—these details remind us (as they show Hamlet himself to be realizing) that Yorick’s skull is more than what Yasuhiro Ogawa suggests when he writes: “a didactic property of emblematic significance, the skull serves as a grim reminder of the end of all human endeavors” (Ogawa 201). To say so quickly and assuredly, as Ogawa and others do, that the skull serves as a memento mori ignores the far more basic and powerful fact that the skull is most simply and above all the material that remains of one who once was. That may seem smaller, indeed; it may seem primary and obvious. But a line like “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft,” with its (Horatio might say curiously) particular attention to Yorick’s actual, decayed flesh, shows that what is being examined here is not (or not only) the idea of the temporal flesh, but rather the flesh itself. Or rather, again, what is being examined, quite visibly, is the palpable absence of that flesh on the skull in Hamlet’s hand—an absence that inevitably leads to the flesh’s being reimagined, remembered, represented. Which is, of course, just another kind of “idea of the flesh.” If, as T. S. Eliot famously wrote,[4] John Webster “saw the skull beneath the skin,” then Hamlet, in this scene, sees the skin “beneath” the skull (Eliot 47).

What is at issue here, then, is not mere iconicity, but materiality—and the material, bodily artifact’s relation to representation. If Ogawa seems reductive in calling the skull a “property” (by which I take him to mean a dramatic “prop”[5]), he is by no means altogether wrong. Indeed, throughout the play, Hamlet holds his mirrors up to nature precisely by creating such representational stagings of what is or was. What makes this example unique, though—and what makes the skull as memento mori different from other mementi of its kind (snuffed candles, decayed flowers, an hourglass)—is that the skull is not simply a mirror. It is no mere “counterfeit presentment” like the picture of another dead man that Hamlet shows to his mother in Act III, Scene 4, but is rather simultaneously a representation of the thing and the actual thing represented. The special frisson of this scene, I think, for Hamlet’s audience and perhaps for Hamlet himself, comes from this recognition that, in the case of the corpse, representation and reality can (might in fact necessarily) co-exist. We learned early on of Hamlet’s awareness that the social manifestation of an interior reality could only be representational[6]—that to express one’s inner emotion was only to seem to be in grief, in love, or what have you. Here, though, while Yorick’s skull leads Hamlet out into his relatively abstract reflections on loss, vanity, and earthly power—i.e. while it functions as a representational symbol of those more abstract truths—it also and insistently brings him back in to a focus on itself, on that which it most immediately and tangibly is: in Douglas Robert Reifler’s words, “the rotten skull of someone he actually knew” (Reifler 329). This is why, as Reifler notes, the common misquotation of Hamlet’s “I knew him, Horatio” betrays a failure to grasp the precise nature of the skull’s effect on him. Even Hamlet, who has just noticed the desensitization of the gravedigger who “sings in grave-making” (V.i.65-66), has clearly been desensitized himself, such that seeing the particular skull of Yorick, a man whom he actually knew when in life, makes the experience of seeing such an object newly arresting.

The impact is emphasized through comparison with the skulls Hamlet sees immediately before this, when his comments in fact fit much more closely the descriptions of critics who emphasize the memento mori aspects of the later encounter. What is new in the Yorick passage is not the ubi sunt of Hamlet’s “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment…?”; for we heard that before in his “Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” (V.i.97-98). Nor do we first hear a reflection on vanitas or an expression of contemptus mundi in his “let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come” and “Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’the’ earth?”; for those, too, were suggested in his “…and now my Lady Worm’s, chopless, and knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade” (V.i.87-88). The only earlier moment that comes close to the Yorick speech’s affecting immediacy is in the lines that closely follow the Lady Worm comment: “Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t” (V.i.90-91). This line shows the visceral hitting-home of the first two skulls’ (as Hamlet reads it) memento mori message; and the Yorick speech goes yet further in evoking the even more literally visceral memory of flesh that has been lost. Because Hamlet confronts now the skull of one he actually knew, representation back through memory to that (physically rooted) prior knowledge is made possible—and in fact not only possible but even necessary. The sting of Hamlet’s holding this piece of the body of one he once knew comes from the recognition that a body can be (in part) physically present and yet no longer stand for itself; instead, now, the representational work of memory must be performed in order for the skull to stand for the body that once was.